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Stem cells can drastically reduce the amount of damage following a stroke by limiting the body’s natural “overreaction” to the trauma, a new animal study has found.

Scientists have long known that stem cells seem to offer some protection against stroke damage, but how they did it was not clear. Perhaps the stem cells replace the dying neurons and replicate their functions, many experts suggested.

But stem cells instead appear to alter the expression of dozens of genes to dramatically tamp down the body’s immune and inflammatory responses, according to research by Darwin Prockop, director of the Texas A&M University Health Science Center's Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and colleagues.

While these reflexive responses help the body recover from injury, they also coax immune cells to damage or destroy nearby healthy tissue, a particular problem for sensitive brain cells.

“These responses are excessive—off the scale,” Prockop says. “If you can tone down some of these, you can avoid many of the terrible effects of stroke.”

Prockop and his team blocked blood flow through the carotid artery in mice to cause a stroke. A day later, the researchers implanted stem cells derived from human bone marrow. The treatment reduced the overall neuron damage by 60 percent compared with that seen in untreated animals.

The stem cells altered the expression of more than 10 percent of the approximately 600 genes activated during stroke recovery, many of them directly related to immune and inflammatory responses, the team found.

“This is a new paradigm for how stem-like cells work. They’re not replacing cells, though they can do that in a limited amount.” Prockop says. “It’s really about repairing cells rather than replacing them. That we can stop injured tissue from destroying itself—that was a big surprise.”

The results appeared in a paper published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Sept. 15; the research was conducted while Prockop was a biochemistry professor at Tulane University.

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I heard Dr Prockop speak in early morning AM radio show talking aobut his research. The great thing about his approach is we are talking about collecting stem cells, growing them in the lab then giving them in a bolus IV. The stem cells "go" where they are needed.

Every hospital that already treats leukemia could do this technique as well. It would be available quickly and easily.

I wonder if couple years later there might be some "recovery" as there was in the Freedman of Ottowa stem cell research in which people got the other kind of stem cell transplant (in which people have radiation and chemo) and then had interesting, unlooked for recovery at the 2 year mark. Dr freedman speculated it was due to stem cells healing some areas.

I have long thought that a Prockop style stem cell transplant every 6 months would be terrific for ameliorating MS, and might, just MIGHT, result in some nerve recovery also into the bargain.

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